Is your musical bucket list like ours here at the magazine? Our bucket is just too full of wonderful festivals and other musical events and not full enough of time to fit them all in. Such was the case recently when a press release hit our in-box with details about the release of a documentary film about the Galax Old ...

In 1965 a young film maker from New York named David Hoffman had an idea for a documentary. David grew up like a lot of lads from that era listening to the radio for entertainment. One of the programs he enjoyed was broadcast out of Nashville, TN on Saturday nights. “A whole bunch of us kids on Long Island would ...

Singer/Mandolinist Amanda Cook started singing music with her dad when she was in her mid-20s through her mid 30s. Her dad, a well known banjo player in their hometown and regionally in Florida, bought her a mandolin to play when they formed the band. “I was literally learning to play an instrument while I was in the band,” she admitted. ...

The Americana Music Association will be celebrating it’s 18th year of artist achievements at their annual conference and awards ceremony, September 10th through the 14th, 2019 in Nashville, TN. Emmylou Harris said the event was “the shining star of Nashville and music everywhere.” The Americana Honors & Awards has been broadcast in years past on CMT, Austin City Limits via ...

The International Bluegrass Music Association will celebrate the 30th anniversary of it’s annual awards this September (24th – 28th) in Raleigh, NC, at it’s annual conference and music festival. Del McCoury, who is celebrating his 80th birthday will co-host the event with famed music songwriter, Jim Lauderdale. “What could be better than Del co-hosting the Awards Show with the legendary ...

It is mid-summer and I am on the road from Norfolk, Virginia to Annapolis, Maryland thinking of the upcoming festivals I will be playing later this summer and fall. They are all quite different. The best ones create a fest-family of artists that then grows to include the audience. As a veteran of performing at festivals, and producing a music ...

I don’t remember how or when I first heard of Under the Big Sky Festival, which took place for the first time last weekend in remote Whitefish, Montana (just outside the gates of the epic Glacier National Park). It must have come across my social media since I follow a few of the acts on the bill. In the dreary ...

If you can compose a written sentence in a grammatically accepted manner that conveys a coherent thought to a reader who finds that thought interesting, you are a writer—NO! To be a writer, one must modify those words with others so that the whole word grouping provokes emotional feelings in the reader’s mind. When done properly, a story emerges. Story ...

If you are a fan of Alice Gerrard who, along with her duet partner the legendary folksinger, Hazel Dickens, pioneered the emergence of women in bluegrass, you might be interested in this bit of information. Several years ago at the IBMA convention in Raleigh, NC, the AR trade booth was located near an exhibit explaining a film producer’s effort to ...

Natalya Zoe Weinstein is a multi-instrumentalist and an award-winning songwriter. Together with vocalist, John Cloyd Miller, they make up the string duo of Zoe & Cloyd. Founding members of the trio Red June, the pair have been touring as a duo since 2015. They met in Ashville, NC hanging around the local music scene there in 2005. Red June lasted ...